“Gleeda?” I asked gently. “Are you alright?”
She nodded, but it was slow, delayed, like her body was remembering how to move again. Then she lifted one hand and extinguished the flames in her fireplace with a twist of magic so casual it should have been ordinary, except it made the room feel colder, and smaller, and tense.
She rose, crossing to her workbench. Her fingers trembled as she rummaged through a box, and the sound of glass and metal clinking together seemed far too loud in the hush that had fallen.
The High Lord stepped forward impatiently. “Healer—” Gleeda turned back with something small in her palm.
She hobbled toward him, hand outstretched.
Whatever it was, it mattered, because the moment he saw it, the arrogance fell off his face like a mask ripped away. His eyes widened, and something like fear—real fear—flashed through him.
Gleeda’s voice was quiet when she spoke, and it didn’t sound like a warning so much as a truth that had been waiting a very long time to be released.
“Things aren’t always what they seem.”
His breath caught. He stared at his palm. “A moonstone,” he said, the words scraping out of him. “You’re the one who sent it to me.” His voice rose with each syllable until the air itself seemed to vibrate. “I demand you tell me what you know—at once.”
The crystals hanging in Gleeda’s window began to clank together, rattling softly as the ground trembled under the weight of hispower.
Still, Gleeda didn’t speak. Her eyes glistened, and there was that same aching longing in her expression, as if she had a lifetime of words caught behind her teeth and no permission to let them out.
The High Lord’s patience snapped. “Who are you?” he hissed, stepping in close. “Are you wearing a glamour?”
He grabbed her wrist.
I surged to my feet so fast my muscles screamed. “Stop!
Don’t hurt her!”
He didn’t even look at me. His voice turned brutal, full of threat and grief tangled together. “She knows something. I know she does. Green magical energy began to swirl from his gemstone embedded forearms down to his fingertips. Tell me, or your remaining days will be spent as stone.”
Tears streamed down Gleeda’s face, but she didn’t flinch from him. She held his stare with an expression so heartbreakingly tender it made my chest ache.
He squeezed harder.
I didn’t think—I moved, acting on pure, instinctive impulse. Gleeda looked like she had something to say, but for some reason she couldn’t. And there was only one thing I knew that could drag the truth out of you, whether you wanted it to or not.
My fingers dug into my pocket and closed around the truth stone Titus had told me to keep, and I pressed it into Gleeda’s palm like I was fitting a key into a lock.
The magic worked immediately.
Gleeda sucked in a deep breath like she’d been drowning for years, and the sound she made when she spoke was not the frail
healer’s voice at all. It was younger, and broken, and overflowing with love.
“My Folli-Pollie!”
The High Lord went utterly still.
The pressure in the room shifted, as if the castle itself had leaned in to listen.
His hand fell away from her wrist like his fingers no longer knew what to do. His face drained of color so fast it frightened me, and when he spoke, his voice cracked in a way that didn’t belong to someone so powerful.
“That’s… that’s what my mother used to call me.”
His knees hit the stone as if he couldn’t handle the weight of it all.
Gleeda’s hand flexed around the truth stone, and the air around her began to swirl. Magic rippled across her skin—not the soft, silvery mist of a simple glamour, but something strained and viscous. Thick. Gelatinous. It clung to her like tar, pulsing with something dark and forbidden.
